All posts tagged Boilly

Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761 – 1845) was 28 and an established painter when the French Revolution broke out. He managed not to get his head cut off by the apostles of freedom and equality, going on to survive the rise and fall of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, and enjoying a long and successful career – 84 was quite a ripe old age, especially back then.

The National Gallery owns just one Boilly painting, the small but intriguing A Girl at a Window. For this exhibition they’ve borrowed 20 works from a British private collection which have never previously been displayed or published and hung them all in Room One of the gallery (up the stairs and immediately to your left, if you come in the main entrance).

So this really is an unparalleled opportunity to find out more about an artist who is little known in Britain.

The twenty paintings and drawings on display show that Boilly was a lot of fun. He comes from an era when people used paintings for amusement and entertainment and information and titillation.

The latter motive is to the fore in two or three of his paintings from the 1790s. In these boudoir scenes or ‘seductive interiors’ Boilly combines two or three of key concerns. One is human interest. This is an anecdotal scene of two nubile young women comparing feet (and stockings). For the time this was quite a ‘saucy’ picture in that you can see a lot of the ladies’ stockinged feet and (as the wall label points out) a titillating amount of bosom on the verge of falling out of both women’s dresses. Boilly was certainly not highbrow. He wanted to please and entertain.

But the second feature of this painting is the phenomenal attention to detail. When you lean in you can see how much fun he’s had capturing the difference textures and surfaces and the play of light on the wooden table, the pink sash, the silver tankard and the sheets of paper behind them. A tremendous eye for detail and a concern that the image is completely finished. The looseness of brush we are used to in the Impressionists and everyone who followed is inconceivable here. Every millimetre of the canvas is covered in paint which depicts the scene in loving detail.

But it was scenes of Parisian street life that made Boilly famous. the exhibition includes half a dozen paintings of street scenes – working men gambling at a tavern, a beggar importuning a smartly dressed couple couple, a small crowd of gawpers gathered round a punch and judy booth.

This is narrative or anecdote painting. You’re meant to admire the overall composition, but then are encouraged to look out for all the humorous touches and details the painter has included – the boy at far right trying to look inside the booth, the soldiers at far left commenting, the old lady nursing a baby under the tree, the dog on the left has he seen or smelt something? And of course the central event they’re all looking at which is the hand puppet of Mr Punch trying to fit a hoop over the neck of a cat.

Note the twee little girl in a bonnet with her face turned towards us. Boilly’s crowd scenes nearly always include someone looking out directly at the viewer, including us in the scene. And then, stepping back, note that by far the brightest, best illuminated part of the painting is the bright pink and white dresses of the two young ladies with their backs to us. Once you’ve noticed how dazzlingly bright they are, you can read the painting again, purely in terms of the play of light and shade. When you do that, you come to appreciate how cannily Boilly has used various levels of lighting to create a dynamic interplay between different parts of the composition.

The French Revolution brought a new class to power, very loosely definable as the bourgeoisie, the educated middle classes who supplanted the French aristocracy in positions of power. Boilly’s naughty but nice interiors, and his observant depictions of street scenes were aimed at this new market. Instead of lofty allegories about Greek gods – the kind of thing which made aristocrats feel clever and godlike – Boilly’s pictures depict Parisian life as it actually was, naughty young ladies, beggars, the homeless, street entertainers, fine looking bourgeoisie, workers in rags.

The teemingness of it, the panoramic effect reminds me of the huge series of novels written by Honoré de Balzac which commenced in the same year as the Poor Cat and as what is arguably Boilly’s masterpiece, A Carnival Scene.

It is a winter’s afternoon and characters from the Italian commedial dell’arte are roaming the streets of Paris alongside men dressed as monkeys and aristocratic spectres from the pre-revolutionary era. Down at the front is a dog leaping with a theatrical mask over its tail, a boy is blowing a horn, a fat lady is climbing into the coach in the middle and her skirts have blown up to reveal her bare buttocks. This is the largest panorama of Paris life Boilly attempted, and I think you can detect its influence in later panoramic anecdotal paintings.

There’s a (slightly spooky) figure at the front a third of the way across the painting which is holding out its arms to the scampering dog. This gesture reminded me of William Powell Frith’s classic panorama, Derby Day, painted about 25 years later in 1858, where, in the centre at the front an acrobat entertainer dressed in white with yellow shorts is holding out his arms to his son who is completely distracted by the lavish meal being laid out on a picnic to his left (our right).

The Derby Day by William Powell Frith (1856 – 1858)

Comparing the two paintings brings out how totally Frith has assimilated all the lessons of painting and applied them directly to depicting his day with complete realism, fastidiously capturing costume, human types, and the chaotic teeming of the crowd.

By contrast Boilly seems very dated. The pink sky and the overall brown hue refers back to the countless landscapes of the Dutch school of the 17th century. Although his crowd is teeming, too, a look at any individual in it indicates that they are either caricatures (all the masked and costumed characters) or sentimentalised (the young ladies) and Boilly uses bright white light to lead the eye towards the centre of the composition and the fine lady in an expensive yellow dress, which acts as a sort of visual and psychological anchor. The well-heeled bourgeoisie are still at the heart of, still in control of things.

Portraits

Boilly’s depictions of modern urban life made his reputation at the Salon, but it was his vast output of portraits which made him his income. Over the course of his career he painted over 5,000 small portraits for a huge range of patrons, soldiers, lawyers, members of the Napoleonic nobility and the bourgeoisie.

Most of these were smallish oil portraits measuring about 22cm by 17cm. It is recorded that they took him about two hours to complete. He was nothing if not a pro. But I’ve chosen to represent his skill at depicting the human face with this set of charcoal and chalk drawings of Jean Darcet and six members of his family. It’s a funny mix of the conventional and the truly realistic. The two young ladies on either side of the venerable patriarch have rather simpering expressions and the chap at bottom left looks like a certain stock type of 18th century portrait. It was the row of sons along the bottom that caught my attention, specially the chap with the porky cheeks second from left. I really like the way they all have very loose and scruffy haircuts.

Sentimentality

Connected to the portraits are Boilly’s rather sickly sweet treatment of small children. Boilly was married twice (both wives predeceased him) and fathered ten children, of whom four died young. This picture depicts three of Boilly’s young sons, Julien adjusting the position of Alphonse’s head, while Édouard (left) looks on. It’s one of several which focus on small children and mothers.

If you look on the left you can see the boys’ pet dog is sitting to attention, with a stick over one soldier like a soldier. Yes, this is sickeningly sentimental tripe for a sensitive bourgeois audience, but Boilly knew his market very well. Pictures like this sold very well, particularly to mothers, which is why many of them feature a mother amid her oh-so-lovely brood.

Trompe l’oeil

I had no idea that Boilly coined the expression trompe l’oeil, which is French for ‘deceives the eye’ and has come to be the term used to refer to tricks with paint which create visual illusions. The final little section of the display shows three or so paintings which use trompe l’oeil effects including this, the only Boilly painting the National Gallery possesses, A Girl at a Window.

It dates from 1799, the decade when Boilly was painting his saucy interiors, and it is an interior with a young woman but there’s nothing hugely saucy about it. As in so many of the paintings the figure is looking directly out at us, inviting us into the scene and at first we are – as we’ve seen in some of his other works – mainly taken with her face and dress because this is so very highlighted, so bright, the best lit part of the composition.

Only slowly do our eyes adjust to the relative gloom of the rest of the scene and slowly come to realise how absolutely packed it is with anecdote and detail. To the right not just a vase but a bowl with a fish swimming in it, echoed by the smaller vial in front of it and then some kind of stick (or flute). And when you really look you realise there is a bird cage hanging on the wall above the goldfish bowl.

And to the left is an attractive young boy peering through a telescope trained off to the left. Look at the catchlight on the rim of the telescope and then on the frame and tripod supporting it. The depiction of light and reflection is wonderful.

And then you notice the frieze carved into the stone beneath the window ledge. Half a dozen characters are depicted in that, caught in some mythological travails.

It qualifies as a trompe l’oeil, as a humorous attempt to trick the viewer because although it is painted, every aspect of it is designed to make it look like a print, namely the fact that it is monochrome, painted only in shades of black, white and grey. This illusion is accentuated by the grey mount or surround for the picture which is itself painted, and by the artist’s ‘printed’ signature at bottom left.

Coming to A Girl at a Window hanging on its own in the National Gallery, you might have been intrigued for a few minutes and then passed on. The achievement of this small but beautifully formed little exhibition is to place it in the context of a life and career which was artful, clever, stylish and fun.

At the moment the National Gallery is forcing visitors to enter through the small Getty entrance to the right of the main portico. You trot up some stairs and go through an airport-style metal detector security, walk past the enormous shop (there are three main shops in the gallery) into the long narrow space called the Annenberg Court, and then have to mount quite a big flight of stairs to reach the main entrance hall.

The stairs are black and are attached to one wall of a large white space. Usually it is painted pure white to create a sense of light and emptiness. Now, however, it has been decorated by leading British artist, Bridget Riley, with a series of large green, beige and grey dots.

Messengers by Bridget Riley. Photo by the author

Riley (born in 1931 and a Companion of Honour and a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire aka CBE) made her reputation in the 1960s as a leading proponent of Op Art i.e. art interested in exploring all kinds of optical illusions.

The wall labels explain that this work is entitled ‘Messengers’ because Constable referred to clouds as ‘messengers’ in one of his letters. It is deliberately ambiguous so it can also be taken as an allusion to the numerous angels, messengers and bearers of news, that we see in the skies of so many National Gallery pictures.

A more direct influence is the pointillist technique of the French painter George Seurat, famous for large scale pointillist masterpieces such as Bathers at Asnières.

It’s easiest to think of Riley’s dots as a sampling of Seurat’s little dots which have been blown up to huge proportions. When this happens you learn that most of a Seurat painting is made up of the spaces between the coloured dots – just as the ‘solid’ atoms which make up us and everything around us are actually mostly empty space.

Because, in my opinion, what the dots do is emphasise the size and whiteness of the space, bring it out. Previously this was a big white empty space. Now, it has become much more problematic for the eye and mind. The wall label which explains the work suggests that, if you pause (on the landing at the top of the stairs or half way down the stairs) to look at the dotted wall, they will leave after-images on the viewer’s retina that suggest volume and movement.

Maybe. To the number-minded like myself they suggest some kind of pattern. In fact I quickly realised they are painted in broken diagonal lines. If there were a few more of them they’d begin to crystallise into Xs. As it is there are diagonal ‘paths’ between the lines. Can you see any other patterns?

Messengers by Bridget Riley. Photo by the author

Anyway, after reading the label and pondering Messengers for a few minutes, I passed on to the Boilly exhibition in Room One of the gallery, across the central hall (and next to another, huge, shop).

When I came back the same way, walking across the old, dark-wood-panelled central hall, I suddenly realised that, approached from this side, the big atrium and Riley’s dots are framed by a characteristically Victorian, huge, dark, oak-framed doorway.

Framed. Just like one of the thousands of Old Master paintings in the rest of the gallery.

Messengers by Bridget Riley. Photo by the author

My photo doesn’t really convey it, but to me this framing effect gave the image a lot more bite.

Standing on the stairs beneath the big white open space of the court felt a bit like being on the escalator at any number of modern shopping centres, with a vague sense of a big light space looming over you.

But framed like this, the image had more definition and power.

Also, God knows how many art videos I’ve seen which make a virtue of showing nothing very much happening, and so I found the framing effect almost transformed it into an art video experience.

In a sort of way, for a few minutes, I enjoyed standing there, in line with the centre of the doorway, watching people walk in and out of it, almost all of them busy and purposeful, but a few pausing to lean against the balcony and look out at the dots.

I liked the contrast between the black oak doors, the black outline of the balcony and the (mostly) black clothes that everyone was wearing and the ringing white walls of the Annenberg Court.

I liked the contrast between the complete stasis of the dots, caught/trapped/arranged in their punctured latticework – and the busy, chaotic strutting, strolling, ambling, chatting, pausing and hesitating of the people moving in front of it.